This week’s Poem of the Moment, courtesy of Scottish Poetry Library, brings a welcome flash of spring sunshine. In a country still rocked by political aftershocks, there’s relief in the imagery of The Light Streams In, though not without ambiguity – which also suits the Scottish climate.

Outside the window,
the long beast of spring
the transparent dragon
of sunshine
rushes past

Tomas Tranströmer

Read all of The Light Streams In on The Scottish Poetry website.

“There are dark currents beneath the surface,” observes Robin Fulton in his Guardian obituary of the Swedish poet, psychologist and Nobel laureate, Tomas Tranströmer, who died in March this year at the age of 83. “Some of his later works are enigmatic.”

Pause for a moment to consider the first verse of After a Death translated by Robert Bly:

Once there was a shock
that left behind a long, shimmering comet tail.
It keeps us inside. It makes the TV pictures snowy.
It settles in cold drops on the telephone wires.

Or National Insecurity, translated by Robin Fulton

The Under Secretary leans forward and draws an X
and her ear-drops dangle like swords of Damocles.

For most readers outside Sweden,Tranströmer’s work was read only in a tongue not used by the poet. His poetry has been translated into 60 different languages, and The Light Streams In, which first appeared in the 1996 collection The Sad Gondola, was translated by Robin Fulton, a Scottish poet living in Norway.

Acknowledging the challenge of translation, he adds: “There would be no point in denying that much is lost in the translation of Tomas’s poems – but the intriguing question is why so much survives to entrance so many readers.

Tranströmer, who worked as a psychologist with addicts, offenders and the disabled, was both a prolific poet and translator. In 2011, eleven years after suffering a severe stroke which robbed him of most of his speech, Tomas Tranströmer was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature: “because through his condensed, translucent images, he gives us fresh access to reality.”

Please note the Scottish Poetry Library are hosting two reading groups about Tomas Tranströmer this Saturday, 16 May, 11am & 2pm at the Saltire Society, off the Royal Mile, Edinburgh.